What open society curricula would you like your children to be free to access Massively Open Online

Sir Fazle Abed has been awarded the most recent open society award by Geroge Soros and his central European university hosted out of the wonderful capital of Budapest where the father of computing john von Neumann came of age- brac is also the inaugural winner of the WISE education Oscars hosted out of Qatar

BRAC -the world's largest and most openly collaborative ngo - is the benchmark Norman Macrae Youth Foundation loves most to help peoples value by looking at its open microfranchise solutions first - by and for grassroots networks celebrating youth's greatest job creating pusrpoeses with such entrepreneurial practice freedoms as

banks for jobs

health locally for all

local food security including nutrition, zero waste, clean energy

open technology -Bangladeshi village youth are the greatest wizards at life critical apps as they have been twinning life critical social labs and mobile connectivity for longer than anyone else thanks to George Soros providing a free loan to make village phones connect the disconnected

open education designed around learning a living

Some of the extremely affordable and innovative pro-youth economic system designs BRAC has mapped to facilitate youth's and communities' greatest collaboration purposes are shown

CEU Awards Open Society Prize to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed

This year's Central European University Open Society Prize was awarded to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder and chairperson of BRAC, the largest international non-governmental development organization, in Budapest at CEU's graduation ceremony on June 13.

I’d like to begin by thanking the Central European University for bestowing upon me the Open Society Prize. What a great honour, and a wonderful opportunity to deliver a commencement address at this great university.

I have recently been re-reading The Open Society and its Enemies, the book after which the Open Society Prize is named, whose author, Karl Popper, was the prize’s first recipient. I first read this book 50 years ago, when I was much closer in age to those in this graduating class.

It was a different time and place. My country, Bangladesh, had not yet achieved independence, and the world’s great powers were locked in a struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. But what strikes me today is how relevant many of Popper’s prescriptions still are – particularly for my own field, which is the alleviation of poverty.

To those about to graduate, it is likely that most of you, at some point in your lives, will question whether the path you have taken was the correct one. For me, this moment came following the cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1970, an event that is still considered one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.

I was working at the time for a large multinational corporation, a valuable experience in its own right. I remember visiting coastal villages struck by the cyclone, seeing hundreds of dead bodies strewn on the ground. It seemed to me the life I was leading was completely irrelevant.

After my country’s independence, I began working to try to help the poor in Bangladesh. My early colleagues and I initially thought that BRAC would be a short-term effort. But the realities of entrenched poverty soon changed our minds. We began working in a host of areas – agriculture, healthcare, human rights, microfinance, education – wherever the poor faced obstacles.

We found that poverty was so entrenched that only a long-term effort of social and economic transformation would uproot it. And this task became my life’s work.

I have learned much along the way. Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that when you create the right conditions, poor people will do the hard work of defeating poverty themselves.

I learned the importance of having lamps to illuminate your path, even when the precise course is unclear. For me, one of these lamps was Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, who wrote a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which had a profound effect on me. Freire's idea of conscientisation, or raising critical consciousness, informed us in our belief that poor people, especially women, can be organised for power, and that with right set of organisational tools, they can become actors in history.

This, to me, is the meaning of an open society – a society where everyone has the freedom to realise their full potential and human rights.

I’ve also learned the importance testing assumptions, of making sure your ideals correspond to the reality around you.

BRAC was founded with very high ideals, in part to fulfil the promises of our country’s liberation movement – the promise of freedom from exploitation. But if these ideals inspired us, we’ve always tried to focus on what works, rather than our theories about what should work.

This pragmatism has allowed us to translate compassion into action on a massive scale. Today, BRAC reaches almost 130 million people in 11 countries.

We’ve seen that without scepticism, scientific inquiry, and the constant questioning of one’s assumptions, the highest ideals will falter when tested against reality. In the words of Karl Popper, among the enemies of open society is the notion of “prophetic wisdom,” the type of knowledge that leaves little room for doubt. In contrast to utopian goals, Popper embraced “piecemeal social engineering” – solutions that are effective, even if they are not the most elegant.

There is an element of that in BRAC – in its willingness to adapt, in its constant innovation, and in its willingness to learn from its own mistakes. After more than 40 years, we are still a learning organisation.

The vision of BRAC is a world free from all forms of exploitation and discrimination. I am sometimes asked if such a world is really possible – whether I believe that poverty can be truly eradicated. The truth is, I believe it can be.

Ladies and gentlemen, we can see today that poverty is on the retreat. Recent statistics from the World Bank show that in every region of the world, the number of people living in extreme poverty is dropping for the first time in recent memory.

But to borrow Popper’s phrase, there is no prophetic wisdom in this fact. The eradication of human poverty remains an ongoing and arduous task rather than historical certainty, and much work remains. And I invite you to bring your own creativity and potential to this task.

Therefore, is it with both optimism and humility that I accept the Open Society Prize, and I wish the graduating class my sincere congratulations. May you all find a meaningful path, illuminated by high ideals, guided by constant learning.

Javier Solana receives the Open Society Prize at Central European University

As part of CEU's 20th anniversary graduation ceremony, former EU top diplomat Javier Solana received the Open Society Prize, awarded annually to an individual who has contributed to transformation and democratic societies. Solana then addressed our 600 graduating students, urging them to be creative and imaginative in all their future endeavors.

Ask Istvan Rev a question, and his answer often reaches into the archives. His own, that is: the Open Society Archives at Central European University, in Budapest.

Mr. Rev is director of the archives, which he founded in 1995. He is also a professor of history and political science at the university, which was founded by George Soros in 1991. (Mr. Rev sits on the board of Mr. Soros's nonprofit advocacy group, the Open Society Institute.)

The professor's research, including his latest book, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford University Press), is cited often in the burgeoning research on the collapse and afterlife of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. Prominent colleagues across academic disciplines rave about his intellect and his passion for social issues. Mr. Rev's scholarly excavations of graveyards, show trials, and political repression, they say, have immense relevance beyond the field of Hungarian history.

Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of the humanities at Harvard University and founder of the school of literary criticism known as "New Historicism," has taught seminars with Mr. Rev. "It's difficult to put, in quotable and simple ways, the subtlety and cunning of Istvan's mind," Mr. Greenblatt says. "Or the way in which his deeply skeptical intelligence is wrapped around a core of decency and democratic idealism."

"His reputation among scholars in the U.S. is very high," says Katherine Verdery, a professor of anthropology at City University of New York, whose work also dissects communism and its afterlife. "A new book by Istvan Rev is something to really get excited about."

Yet it is the archives, more than his books and essays, that excite and obsess Mr. Rev. He speaks with an evangelical fervor about the collection, which has become a hub for the study of the cold war and its various discontents. The archive has 27 full-time employees, an annual budget of $1.2-million, and boasts materials in 32 languages.

Now the 54-year-old historian is expanding the Open Society Archives into new areas, including human-rights violations all over the world. The collection has been indispensable, he says, to his own acclaimed work -- and inescapable as well.

The archive is "under my feet," says Mr. Rev. "I live in it. With it."

Dad (Norman Macrae) created the genre Entrepreneurial Revolution to debate how to make the net generation the most productive and collaborative . We had first participated in computer assisted learning experiments in 1972. Welcome to more than 40 years of linking pro-youth economics networks- debating can the internet be the smartest media our species has ever collaborated around?

1972: Norman Macrae starts up Entrepreneurial Revolution debates in The Economist. Will we the peoples be in time to change 20th C largest system designs and make 2010s worldwide youth's most productive time? or will we go global in a way that ends sustainability of ever more villages/communities? Drayton was inspired by this genre to coin social entrepreneur in 1978 ,,continue the futures debate here